Weekly Brief
As the sun sets on the Duterte administration the new Marcos government aims to keep the lights on until June.
In review and in prospect
We’re currently in a lull sort of what you would go through at work over the required notice period from the time you tender your resignation up to the point when you are out the door on your last day. The new president-elect and most likely his vice president-elect are taking the time to sort out personal matters before they step into the toughest job of the land in June. Then again, even now, they are faced with the job of cobbling together a government and Cabinet — essential tasks to ensure continuity is sustained and handovers are clean. With much to do, lots to fix, and many projects to complete, the new Philippine Government under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte need to hit the ground running to ensure the gift that is the unprecedented mandate the Filipino people gave them is put to good use.
As the rest of the country focuses on formulating and discussing productive next steps, the stragglers of what was once the “mighty” KakamPink campaign of failed presidential candidate Leni Robredo remain in a funk — retreating into mutual therapy sessions within the very echo chambers within which their catastrophic electoral loss this year percolated for months. These are now just small noises that many of the Philippines’ Big Corporate Media organisations are trying their darnedest to amplify to create a false sense in the public that Robredo and her Yellowtard followers remain relevant. While it is certain that the Yellowtards are no longer even an afterthought amongst the more than 60 percent of Filipinos who gave administration candidates in the Executive and Legislative branches their landslide mandate to lead and represent them, it is also quite likely that they will no longer figure in the broader Opposition that will take shape over the next six years. The sting of loss over no less than three “important” elections has so blighted the Yellowtard brand that no politician serious about a career will touch their colours, their narrative, and their style of thinking with a ten-foot pole.
It is important to recognise with eyes wide open that the Marcos government faces an uphill battle not just given what it inherits from its predecessors and the complex global dynamics ahead but also what the losers in these elections — who are hopping mad over the colossal loss of face they suffered — will be doing to undermine his administration at every turn. One must not underestimate the power of influential institutions that remain committed to prove that Marcos is “evil” and everyone who is against him comprise the “good” — the medieval Roman Catholic Church, the cartel of private schools its lieutenants run, the Philippines’ media organisations and the cadre of foreign correspondents it feeds “news report” scripts and templates to, and the “fact checkers” who infest social media platforms many of which are run by country managers friendly to the Yellowtard “cause”. The irony that Marcos won on a “disinformation” campaign flies over the heads of the “thought leaders” of this “cause” when one considers the nature of how the Church has historically regarded information and the vast sums of money that drives and narrows the motivations of Big Corporate Media editors.
In these times it is important that Filipinos continue to focus on the signal and get better at tuning out the noise. This is easier said than done. Social media timelines and the algorithms that determine what these serve command a vast amount of people’s attention spans today. It is easy to be led to believe that certain things are important when, in the actual bigger schemes of things, they only constitute mere footnotes. Once trusted as the go-to for what is true and complete, Big Corporate Media have dropped the ball and now habitually fail in their public service of providing an objective view that serves as reality checks to our individual biases and tunnel visioned points of view. Contrary to what we are now being told, there is no solution yet to that problem and any one party that pitches itself as the solution should be regarded with healthy scepticism at best for now. The reality that we are in new territory and how humanity deals with this new landscape is still in the process of taking shape.
Last week’s blog posts
If Professor Clarita Carlos is a “pet analyst”, then JC Punongbayan is a quack “economist”
May 22, 2022 by benign0
"Clarita Carlos has a vast body of scholarly work to her name — something a Rapplerette like Lian Buan is unlikely to have parsed over a big enough sample set for solid bases for input into her 'news reporting'."
Character-based politics and why it should stop
May 19, 2022 by The Unpopular Opinion
"The 1987 constitution perpetuates an electoral system where the electorate becomes enamored and fanaticized more on the politicians themselves, rather than their advocacies, principles, and platforms."
May 18, 2022 by benign0
"They are now an affront not just to the president-elect himself but to the 31 million Filipinos who voted for him and against the Yellowtards."
Modern Culture vs. Traditional culture: Why I choose the former
May 18, 2022 by ChinoF
"Then you have the wokes. Wokes at first seem to be a product of capitalism, but I think they are actually a product of tribalism struggling against capitalism."